From an interactive festival for an audience of 35,000 to a bespoke experience for a single audience member, from online particpatory experiences to a show-within-a-show turning Punchdrunk’s Masque of the Red Death into a treasure hunt-turned-supernatural inflected family drama, the sheer breadth of Coney’s experience in making interactive art is very hard to better. Artistic Director Tassos Stevens talks to the voidspace about the wild ride that the company has been on through its varied production history, the key tenets of audience engagement and using play to spark change, and how a playground swing can be a useful learning tool for interactive artists of all kinds.
voidspace:
Welcome to the voidspace. Let’s start off by asking you who you are and what you do.
Tassos Stevens:
My name is Tassos Stevens, and I am part of Coney, a charity that makes all kinds of play to spark change. That’s our mission statement. The ‘all kinds of play’ can be anything that people can take part in, and play, and then a huge variety of nouns combined with adjectives in order to describe different forms and formats. It’s tricky to explain because people tend to think of experiences in terms of what happens, what do I do? Because things can be a bit different each time. Sometimes it’s easier to talk about what it’s trying to do, or who it’s for, or where it happens.
And as for me, I’m not always a maker on everything that Coney makes and I also make things outside Coney sometimes. I used to be a psychologist, and then I used to be a theatre director, and I’ve done many other little jobs along the way. I only really realised what I was doing by myself in my early 40s, but then realised everything up until that point, although it had felt like a career in the sense of a car careering, out of control, everything actually had led me to that place.
voidspace:
That’s interesting, I think, what you say about how difficult it is to describe what you do, because something I feel sometimes is that these worlds of gaming, theatre, etc, can feel a bit siloed. So it’s interesting that you’re doing something that maybe crosses those lines a bit more than others in that space.
Tassos Stevens:
I think people like what they like, which is great. I’m not saying that as a criticism, but people will often know what they like, and they’ll play, or take part in, or watch whatever those things are. And to do things which are a little bit different, or might be at the edge, or in a space between things is a harder ask. I’m probably quite conservative myself, in my actual playing and watching tastes, but I’m fascinated by making things and trying to understand how things work, and as a maker I wear many hats. I’m an interactive dramaturg and a writer sometimes, a game designer sometimes, a performer sometimes, and even a bloody programmer sometimes, even though I am not the world’s best coder.
voidspace:
You were saying before how it’s easier to describe some of your work in terms of what you’re trying to do with it, or how you’re trying to get people to feel or the sort of experience that you’re trying to create, regardless of genre. I’d be interested if you could tell me a bit more about that. Where are you trying to get people with your work?
Tassos Stevens:
There’s an ethos which is important. So, adventure, curiosity and loveliness are the three kind of key principles that sort of kind of been coined because the rule of three is also always good. And we’ve sharpened the mission a little bit. The way that we are describing it in public is simply to say, we’re making responding to the causes which matter to people and being a little bit opaque because we’re a charity. The political context for charities right now is getting wild.
We’re definitely interested in responding to the climate, and other crises. Responding to difference and division. We’re doing things like trying to illuminate power in play, past and present, and have an arc of impact, from care and resilience, through to playful activism. That’s the mission statement, and then we’ll have different things in mind for each different piece – and we make a huge variety of pieces.
We’ve met through these screens, haven’t we?
voidspace:
Yes – I did Telephone and The Magic Trick over lockdown.
It’s interesting that you were saying how that you used to be a psychologist, because I did think that there were recognisable psychological principles being put into play in those pieces, in a very healing and connecting way at the time.
Tassos Stevens:
There is some psychology in play, especially in The Magic Trick, although not the psychology I studied. When I was doing a PhD, I did a big bit of research for Channel Four Education. That became a project that we ended up winning a BAFTA for, which was very pleasing.
That was a project called Nightmare High. It wasn’t just Coney: there were a number of different companies and individuals collaborating. It was a project for young people, aged 9 to 13, about resilience for big life changes, especially the move from primary school to secondary school. It was called Nightmare High, and it was an online cartoon world, with various videos and games, and other comic strips and lots of different media, but there was a story arc running through it as well.
It was glorious, but it wasn’t very well treated by Channel Four in the end. It didn’t last very long online, but an old friend who I hadn’t spoken to in a while back then got in touch out of the blue to say she only discovered it after I’d posted about winning the BAFTA, in a vainglorious way. Her ten-year-old had started playing it, and it was having a huge impact, and that was really gorgeous.
As part of the research towards that, there was a big tranche of what I call resilience psychology, that I’m still drawing from. A Magic Trick was devised by me originally with Astrid Briel, who was an associate at Coney but was also a postdoc researcher in impact at the University of Baspar, and originally was designed as a kind of demo for an approach to show how you can use play to spark change. It was meant to introduce the concept and give the players a fun experience. But then we discovered, through doing research pilot with it, with Astrid, that it actually works for about 40% of the people who play. For that 40%, change does happen, and everybody else has fun.
With Telephone, there was maybe less psychology, although there was a bit of that resilience psychology that I’d researched. Part of that was finding this framework for the dimensions of resilience, which are also the dimensions of anything that we do that in and of itself feels good, and actually is good. Anything that has this positive impact on us usually hits these particular dimensions: It will give you a way to develop, feel and express your agency. It will help you connect to other people better and make new or richer connections and relationships. Finally, it will help you both recognise the talents that you have, whatever those might be, and it will help you stretch those talents, learning by stretching our talents or our knowledge, is part of a theory of fun.
voidspace:
Everything there that you’re describing sounds to me to hit the spot, to make a good piece of interactive art.
Tassos Stevens:
Also, I think making something and taking part in a process of making something will also have that positive impact on you. I think a lot of the reason that people who work in theatre do it is because they probably took part in making theatre when they were young, and it made them feel all those things, and they fell in love with what it felt like to be doing that. That’s why they are chasing that dream. Hopeless addicts.
Telephone was made in the first lockdown, and it was one of a series of experiments that I’ve made with another Coney, David Finnigan. We made six pieces in seven weeks, in a rapid-fire iteration. The first three were basically game shows. We just wanted to see how we could use platforms like this in order to bring people connection, to each other as much as to the world. So, we just did things which were fun, which did that. After three, which had gone quite well, we took a break for a week and then thought about what we’d learned and what could we make that would be more interesting and satisfying to make. Telephone was one that I then made. I’ve done storytelling shows before, outside Coney mostly. I thought this would suit Zoom well because it uses direct address. I thought we could use that form to make something about connection, but also, we’ll also use it to make that gesture of actually connecting people. The interval, and the point where the audience come together in breakout rooms, that’s meant to be the highlight. The whole thing is designed for that. I love the fact that there is a significant minority I’ve spoken to who that part of the show rekindled a friendship.
voidspace:
It was an interesting time during the pandemic because everybody had to learn how to use these technologies very quickly and how to make stuff with them.
Tassos Stevens:
I stole a structure from myself, I hasten to add.
I made a storytelling show a few years previous that was about friendship and that was in person, but it had the same structure of having a first act that was short pieces, that could happen in any order, and that would interconnect with the second act. That was the audience talking to each other, both in person and also set people up in Facebook groups. I was experimenting with real lo-fi ways of connecting people. Then there was a tiny act three that wrapped it all up, and it worked really beautifully. .
The other thing I should say is that David and I had less than two days to make each show. I wrote the first Telephone in a day and a half from a standing start. The biggest question was the making the telephone directory of material and then writing the introduction that will both set out that frame but will also act as a piece of participation design to warm people up to the point that they’re ready for what follows.
Then the stories kind of wrote themselves. I made a long list of prompt questions, three of which became the questions that the audience asked each other in the interval, and then just wrote stuff.
voidspace:
Never underestimate the power of a prompt! That is something that I have learned through this project. People respond in all kinds of unexpected ways as well, which is really wonderful.
What does interactivity mean to you, and how does participation design flow into that?
Tassos Stevens:
I teach an interactive dramaturgy 101 course, and this is what I do: There’s a lovely exercise I like to do with people to begin with, with a group, is to get them to talk about any experience they have played. It can be any form or format, and I like to encourage them to diversify: It might be a computer game, it might be an immersive theatre show, it might be a fairground ride, it might be an installation.
voidspace:
I love the idea of broadening the definition of play.
Tassos Stevens:
You want people to recognise that they have experience of interactive play already, even if they haven’t really framed it as that. Also, the way that we communicate these experiences is by talking through the experience from beginning to end. The thing I most often get quoted for saying is that your experience of an event, any event, starts when you first hear about it and only stops if and when you stop thinking and talking about it.
Something I learned along the way from somebody wise was if you’re trying to pitch a project, the best thing you can do is to say what it is, and the best way you can say what it is, is to talk through an imagined experience somebody might have of it, from beginning to end. Don’t talk about why, don’t talk about how, just say what happens and then you can talk about the other stuff later. When we think about experience, we have these mental models.
voidspace:
It’s a form of storytelling, isn’t it, really?
Tassos Stevens:
Yeah, totally. Then I ask them a few questions: Where does it happen? How many audience are playing together at any one time? That playing scale fundamentally affects the kinds of experiences that people can make, because some formats work for some scales and some will break. Then I offer a definition of immersive, which is that immersive is anything where the audience is present in the world of the fiction of the piece. They may have a role, or roles, but that role may also be of the audience. What role, or roles does the playing audience have?
Then I talk about the term ‘jnteractive’. Interactive I define as that there are actions that people can do which will have some consequence, either on their own experience, or on that of that of everybody. Those actions can be as simple as listen and watch like a normal audience, if that listening and watching has a consequence for their own experience of the things that they do.
I also think the sort of storytelling we use is quite heavily influenced by narrative improvisation. I learned a lot from doing workshops with Improbable Theatre who are gurus in this space.
voidspace:
Can you talk me through narrative improvisation, for readers who might not be familiar with it?
Tassos Stevens:
It’s a discipline that I think is forgotten about a little bit in this wave of people talking about games and game design. Improvisation is basically making up a story, a group doing it. There are theatre sports: improv comedy or Who’s Line is it Anyway, that was popular on TV for a while. That’s often about improvising sketches, trying to make people laugh. Narrative improv is a richer and deeper subject that’s about how to improvise a story, and the principles and techniques you can use inside that.
Improbable Theatre’s Keith Johnston, his book, Improv Storytellers, is one of my set texts, and one thing I’ve learned from Keith Johnson is that as audiences, we are making stories happen in our minds all the time. And the question that we are always asking and answering is “What happens next?” You can think of storytelling as continually posing that question, making that question feel really sharp.
voidspace:
That’s the narrative engine, isn’t it?
Tassos Stevens:
Next, in my class, I ask people to talk about the roles and also the actions that audience can take that may have some consequence for their experience or the experience of others. Then I get them to talk to each other in small groups about their different ideas, and find one feature or quality of experience that all these share, and then one interesting difference in the experiences.
The focus is that there is this huge array of possible models of an experience, and also to make the argument that there is no hierarchy. They’re all different and they carry meaning themselves. You choose the right model that carries the meaning for what you want to say, what you want to explore.
voidspace:
I think it’s great that you’re offering people quite a broad starting point, so you can work out where your narrative interests lie.
Tassos Stevens:
When it comes to participation design, I use a rubric that I picked up from another maker called Áron Birtalan. He makes transformative games, LARP-adjacent work, and some LARP as well. Nordic LARP, which is like the experimental theatre of the LARP world. There’s so much wisdom in that scene, in their practice.
Áron offered this really useful framework: that engagement comes from transparency, agency and motivation. Transparency, as in giving people some idea of the kind of experience they’re going to have. It’s not that there can’t be surprises, but they’ve got to be surprises that will be good surprises. People have got to feel safe, on a level of “What am I consenting to take part in?” If they don’t have that confidence, then they’ll be more uncertain.
Then you have agency: Again, this is where it dovetails with that interactivity. “What are the actions I can do? And what happens when I do them? What am I expected to do? What am I allowed to do? But also, critically, how can I choose not to take part, and that be okay?”
voidspace:
You need a safety valve.
Tassos Stevens:
Yeah. In Telephone, if you turned your camera off, then I wouldn’t ask you to do anything.
Finally, there’s motivation: Why would you want to take part, which may be as simple as, it will be fun, but maybe there’ll be other things.
voidspace:
Have you found that as audiences get more familiar with what they think of as the concept of immersive or interactive, that the work you have to do on the transparency front has changed at all? Or do you find that your audiences are pretty much at the same place that they used to be?
Tassos Stevens:
I think people are always the same. They’re always in the same place if they’re being open, unless it’s a form of format that they’ve experienced already. I’m thinking the obvious example of Punchdrunk: their most conventional form, for them. I don’t use that as a cuss. Conventional means that the audience understand the conventional experience, what’s expected.
For a lot of the audience that go to Punchdrunk, it won’t be their first time, it is now a conventional experience for them. They know what to expect and they know the rules and they’re learning how to game it as well. That changes their experience, and the experience of other people within it as well.
voidspace:
It could be argued that that familiarity actually breaks it because Punchdrunk relies on people’s disorientation and that status difference to make it function in the way that it was intended to function.
Tassos Stevens:
When I worked with Felix Barrett [Punchdrunk’s Artistic Director] a long time ago, he talked about a lean forward – lean back kind of engagement that. The clue is in the name. They want people to be slightly leaning back, but with their feet still propelling them, like they’ve lost their head a little bit.
We made a piece back in 2007 & 2008 that was embedded inside Punchdrunk’s Masque of the Red Death.
voidspace:
Oh, yeah. Goldbug. I’ve heard legends of it. It’s really interesting that there was a collaboration between what now feel like two such different ways of engaging.
Tassos Stevens:
To give you some context: Masque of the Red Death was based on the work and worlds of Edgar Allan Poe, taking place at the Battersea Arts Centre. And the BAC commissioned a number of artists, including Coney to take a Poe short story and make an adaptation of it.
Most people made something that then played for two nights on the Friday, Saturday night. We made something that lasted six months. We took the story The Goldbug, which is an unnamed narrator recounting how he and his friend found buried pirate gold by cracking a code.
Our starting point was that this story was a true story, but only half a story, and that Poe had met the unnamed narrator. He was actually called William Moray. He had met Poe in a harbourside bar, jumped on a boat to go to London, where he’d grown up, to Battersea, in fact, having stolen the treasure from his friend, and then to Paris to disappear into the world of the Masque of the Red Death, but had left a puzzle trail. His heir, should he not return, should basically follow the trail, solve the clues.
Our idea was that the trail was laid in Poe’s time and then this was in present day London. Within our fiction there’s a show by Punchdrunk happening at BAC. But the actors are reporting these weird, hauntings and things appearing that they’re not quite sure about, and then somehow, unbeknownst to them, this trail of William Moray is being conjured and the grandson of the original victim of the theft, the one who Moray had ripped off, his friend.
Moray’s friend was now aged 95. He was played by an actual 95-year-old, the grandfather of one of the team. He was a gold billionaire who had funded Masque of the Red Death, and wants to solve this because he wants to lay this family wrong to rest. So he invites people to go into Masque of the Red Death, find these mysterious puzzles and try to solve all of this. Anybody that posts online on a dedicated website – it doesn’t have to be useful, just anything at all – joins the Hunters Club, and everybody in the Hunter’s Club gets a share of whatever’s found.
That’s how it started, and then the run extended and we thought that we could take this to another level. Then it turned into the most intense experience I’ve certainly ever been part of.
I could talk for hours just to tell the story of it. It’s quite full, but highlights included a gang of the keenest players signing themselves up to join the Scooby Gang, accompanying the website administrator as they broke into the building on a Sunday, with torches to explore.
We staged an argument between the website administrator and the real box office person. The administrator blackmailed and bullied to get a set of keys and then they actually went in with torches. Then the lights just started turning on, and a bloodied apparition appeared and they had to get the hell out. It was an actor playing that website administrator, but she was very much part of the design of that experience, so that she would bond with players. This is very much reliant on the idea that only a few people must experience each bit of it but they would always then tell the story on the website.
voidspace:
That’s a very classic Punchdrunk thing, isn’t it? Part of that interactivity, is how you recount the story afterwards. But in Goldbug you were using that in a different way, because players are collaborating to find an answer. It’s using that same process but in a more of a directed way.
Tassos Stevens:
Then, she invited people to her birthday drinks, which happened at the after show bar. The whole room sang Happy Birthday to her. And then at the stroke at midnight, using a classic movie chestnut, a lawyer appeared, an American lawyer. They said “You just turned 25, in which case you’ve just inherited this.” She’s the heir to the thief. She didn’t know.
voidspace:
The players who were with her must have lost their minds!
Tassos Stevens:
Yeah. They’d spent weeks chatting with her and had a couple of really intense bonding experiences.
When they’d solved the puzzle, they had to get into a locked room with a sequence of notes. They didn’t know why. The only way to get into locked room was to find sequence of musical notes. There were numbers. They didn’t know what the numbers were. Somebody worked out there was a sequence of notes, and that it was a Bach Sonata.
After the main event, we told the website administrator’s story. The only way we could tell her story then was to have these tiny immersive experiences happening afterwards that you had to be in the right place at the right time to experience.
So, straight after the show, you’re going to be taken back into the building to find out the real name of the bloodied apparition character that you’d seen during the break in. And in doing that, you find out her story and that she was actually the illegitimate heir to the thief (the Chinatown twist!) and that actually she had an affair with her father, the thief, without either realising. And she tells you this story, she takes you up to the darkened building, to this locked room, opens the room and they’re all in a room where the walls are dripping with (her father’s) blood, there’s this clockwork piano and you suddenly realise “Oh hell! We’ve got to play the music.”
This piano is in a kind of clockwork cabinet. And if you play the wrong notes, it clicks and whirrs but then when you play the right notes, it turns this glass harpsichord. You have to play it all the way through, without making mistakes. At this point the website administrator is also holding the knife with which she killed Daddy, in this very room.
Then you hear needle going onto a wax cylinder and the sound of the voice of the dead man from beyond the grave telling you what you need to.
voidspace:
I can feel the hair standing up at the back of my neck, even listening to you recounting it.
Tassos Stevens:
The first two people that experienced that were strangers, and then when they came out and met, one of them recounted the story, they were holding hands so tightly, and it occurred to him that he might as well propose marriage.
Then at the end there was a witch hunt. The Scooby Gang were then working with the website administrator against everybody else on the online forum, secretly. There was a confrontation between her and the old man, where she inherited like the key. He had the code, and they needed both together, but he refused to sort of do the right thing. We’d spent a long time building up the idea that there was only one paper copy of the key, and she burnt it in front of everybody. There was like 36 hours where there was complete silence, and then they went mad.
The build up to that had been so incredibly intense, where there was this witch hunt happening on the online forum, conducted by the website administrator’s friend, who’d taken over her job.
voidspace:
How did you orchestrate that and make sure that everyone in the experience still felt welcome? I can imagine for some people, if you’re on the wrong side of that dynamic, that might feel quite excluding.
Tassos Stevens:
We didn’t get that right entirely. Early days. I wouldn’t have done it like that again. But it was kind of phenomenal.
There were moments where there was somebody in person I was bit worried about, on the night of that event within the witch hunt. There were two characters who are both against each other, and they’re both then interacting with a smaller group and a larger group of players, the large group work out who are the smaller group, the enemy within.
Because a lot of this was happening online, it was harder to control, and the boundaries were blurry.
voidspace:
Online dynamics are known for being very sane and proportionate!
Tassos Stevens:
I was playing both Sonya and Phil online.
It was all I did every night for weeks. It was like playing some kind of combination chess and poker with a couple of hundred people, trying to remember who had said what to whom, to know what to do. It was crazy.
voidspace:
You need a spreadsheet.
Tassos Stevens:
The thing is that the narrative was all improvised. We were only ever one step ahead of the players. The solution, how to bring that redemption about and to bring them back together, was based around the fact that there was a player who had connected with the character Sonya online. There was a point where I was really hoping he wasn’t going to fall for her.
voidspace:
Because no one knew that these people were fictional?
Tassos Stevens:
They did, but it’s the kind of thing you can kind of kind of forget. When he then shared that actually he was gay, I was relieved, that I wasn’t actually catfishing him.
voidspace:
The parasocials around this sort of thing can be difficult, but when it’s a fictional person…
Tassos Stevens;
There’s so many lines being crossed within this.
He was at uni and he was really interested in theatre. And the finale or this showdown event (where Sonya burned the only copy of the key) clashed with the final night of the first show that he was directing at college. First he said he couldn’t come, then said he would after all. And Sonya said to him “You need to be with your cast. This is the thing you need to do“. Then Sonya sent him a good luck card for his run.
But then this then also gave us the best solution, to being the forum back from being at in conflict. The solution was for Sonya to post a message to say – I’ll change his name – “John has the answer”. Because John has booked to go to Masque two nights later, and she left a message for him to say “Go into this particular room. I left something for you, hidden inside this picture frame.” Then he found out and came back to the forum with the news that the key Sonya had burnt – it wasn’t the only copy of the key.
So he was then the one standing up to say that if people don’t come together and forgive each other, then it over. Then they all came together.
voidspace:
Catharsis! Thank goodness!
How did it work in practice, having a complete show within a show, that potentially attracts a different sort of person to the kind of person who’d maybe normally get very involved in a Punchdrunk show?
A lot of people I know either prefer being masked and at a bit more of a remove, and some people prefer getting more stuck into puzzles and things. How did it work, having those two sorts of audiences actually sharing a space in real time?
Tassos Stevens:
In some ways it was still possible for people to find their own space and way of playing even inside this. I think there were problems in the early months, when it was all about just solving the puzzles. People were tearing through and not kind of really respecting the performance around them.
We had a bit of a crisis meeting a couple of months in, to figure out how to shift that dynamic.
voidspace:
How did you reintegrate it in the end?
Tassos Stevens:
There was something we wrote in that made it clear that there was a need to move more slowly, and to be gentle because it was a part of the world. And also, particularly for the second wave, as we wrote our story, we would direct our audience to witness this or that moment, on the basis that those moments would help them understand. We had to reverse engineer it to achieve that, finding particular moments that were within the Punchdrunk show, that had already been devised and were being performed like clockwork.
So by saying, “This bit is important“, we were forcing people to slow down and observe what’s happening around them a bit more.
We also put a character, one of our lot, as a kind of hooded, masked, mysterious figure in the bar, who could give our audiences an in person briefing.
voidspace:
I think it’s a vexed question with a lot of immersive creators, how you were talking before about expectation setting and the question of how you do that elegantly without breaking world, without breaking state. It feels like a really delicate balance.
Tassos Stevens:
Also, this was something that was six months long and was made for a micro budget. I think I worked out when I did my tax return later that year that it had actually cost me money to do it.
It was a very intimate labour of love, and in that respect we couldn’t repeat it. But then also that meant that we were really taking a real degree of individual care over the 200 or so people who went through the more intense layers of the experience.
voidspace:
That’s still a lot of people to deliver a curated personal experience to. I imagine you didn’t get a lot of sleep.
Tassos Stevens:
The closest thing this now is adventure gifts that Coney makes for people.
It was kind of crazy last year, we had this huge gig, the commission of the City of London Corporation. The Golden Key. It was for over 35,000 people on one day, and we had four months to make it. It was adrenaline and then some, and then the next thing I made was for one person.
There was an adventure gift commissioned by their partner for their anniversary. Their partner had paid a sum and had assisted in the devising, but it’s basically an adventure that’s made just for that person. It’s also made to gently touch on some resonant points for where they are in their life at that moment, and which then is stitched into their life. It included a moment where they were doing a guided tour of the VA with Tristan Hunt, the director, leading it and at one moment he stopped, then pulled out a letter and started reading it to them. And it was part of it. It was part of the adventure. We made a fictional book, because the recipient is an agent for authors. Made a fictional book with a fictional author, but introduced to her by one of her real author friends, who’s based in Alaska, with a story that hoodwinked her, about meeting this librarian on a ferry and got this extraordinary manuscript.
Then the family had a holiday in Wales for a week, and there was a bit of magic involving a book of ghost stories that they suddenly found after going on a quest to a neighbouring village, in a churchyard, in order to open a letter, which was just like a PDF. They then ran back to their cottage to pick up the book of ghost stories that they’d seen the night before. When they opened it up, they found the key that they were looking for, but also that the book had turned completely blank overnight.
voidspace:
What a wonderful thing, to have that curated experience. I’ll have to find a sufficiently rich and knowledgeable person when I turn 50.
To turn to another question: You were talking about Goldbug and how you had to take care over some people, emotionally, and how you had to take responsibility for that. It’s a different world now, in 2023, and the idea of safeguarding has become a big deal, whether it’s physical safety or emotional safety. I’m interested if that’s something that has become part of your practice.
Tassos Stevens:
Yeah, very much so. I partly would go back to Áron Birtalan. He thought better and more clearly about safety and consent inside performances than anyone else I’ve encountered.
There’s a lot coming from what LARP has uncovered, in terms of that transparency, agency motivation, and particularly how to give people agencies that make them better prepared to be able to keep themselves safe. They need to know what’s going to happen. You’ve got to be really clear about how people can tap out and then also be ready for them to. It’s actually fine to stop. Immersion isn’t something that is broken. If you need to you stop, you help somebody and then you can move on.
One of the principles of Coney is the principle of loveliness, and the word is maybe, in some ways, not the best word, but it’s the word that’s stuck. It’s about taking care of people and about taking care of a situation, really listening to and paying attention to what’s going on, and then also aiming to take people along with you. I think it’s also really important to consider what happens after a performance. This is part of LARP practice, the decompression space that you give people, and still holding that space after the show is over.
Something that we made that is probably never going to happen again is a piece called Adventure One, which was kind of risky. It was an adventure that took place in a secret location somewhere in the City of London, the financial district. People were there on a a secret mission, tailing somebody who worked in the heart of the financial system.
Then there was a point where suddenly it all got real. The person you were tailing was turning up. You were exploring the environment and hearing stuff about them, but also moving through real places where there are other real people who are not completely unaware of what you are doing. There will be real security, real police around.
Then when it all gets real and heat turns up, you’re then challenged by the voice in your ear to do something for which there is a general risk of arrest – I might not say what that is. It did pretty much happen every time.
Then later you end up sitting around a table and a conversation is facilitated. This is where the meaning and the politics of the piece were in play, in that final conversation. Part of the tilt was it had been about you all along, and the person that you were telling was actually the same person who had been guiding you. And the thing that you were challenged to do involved something that theoretically – within the fiction – could crash the entire financial market.
voidspace:
Blimey. I think the use of audio and the ability to blur boundaries within that is so interesting. With that sort of safeguarding there’s control of your environment, which I think is something that Punchdrunk lean into very heavily, or there’s control of your audience. Do you have techniques that you tend to use to that end, or is it a bit more whatever the context of the piece demands?
Tassos Stevens:
It depends on the context. Within Adventure One, it was always running through, right from the beginning. You got a phone call before you began the adventure proper, and were reminded that it’s always up to you. You are responsible for your actions and the consequences and if you don’t accept that responsibility, then you’d be thanked, taken back to the beginning and given a refund, but you could go no further.
voidspace:
Did that happen to anyone? Was anyone annoyed that they’d accidentally noped out of it?
Tassos Stevens:
It happened to two people, one of whom actually was looking for an out, and then somebody who was annoyed. “How can you say I’m responsible when I don’t know what’s going to happen? How can I take responsibility? What’s going to happen on the adventure?”
I took her back to the beginning. I spoke to her just as me, just to say, “I hear you, but also think about the other way around. You will be out in the wild. We will have no idea what you’re doing. We have no idea what you’re up to. And we’re doing our best in the way we’ve designed it so that you will be safe.” Even the thing where there was risk of arrest on the surface was actually safe.
voidspace:
It’s all about the illusion of danger while knowing that you’re safe.
Tassos Stevens:
We also played it in undercover or secret agent mode, where you’re told from the beginning that you need to play in a way that means you’re not drawing attention to yourself, nobody can tell you’re playing. That’s part of the role you’re taking on.
Partly also, it makes the play, beat by beat, much more exciting. You notice things, your attention shifts and you suddenly notice a lot more in the in the world around you, things that you might otherwise be habituated to. I think it itself has a political consequence, in that you suddenly see differently the systems that you’re inside of and around, and that’s part of what it means.
I’m currently living in Gloucester for a few months because I’m doing a project with the community which involves this sort of secret agent mode as well. I reveal a secret about Coney to the people who come to participate.
I say “I can tell you this in two ways, and there’s two hands. The right is the playful, mysterious way and the left hand is the straightforward, transparent way. Either or both. Where do you want to start?”
And everybody pretty much invariably wants this hand [waves the playful, mysterious hand]. But they feel safe picking this hand [playful, mysterious hand] because they know that this hand [waves straightforward, transparent hand] is here.
voidspace:
Most people. That’s a beautiful metaphor, actually.
Tassos Stevens:
It used to be the case that I would just give this hand [playful, mysterious hand] and you could see in people’s eyes: They’re either thinking “This is going to be the most exciting thing I’ve ever heard in my life” or: “This is weird. Where’s the door?”
voidspace:
I think you have to have almost an explicit invitation to play, to be able to enter into that space, don’t you, where you can engage in it in the way that’s going to work.
Tassos Stevens:
And to know that people can always ask for the left hand.
Which hand would you like?
voidspace:
Both.
Tassos Stevens:
Where do you want to start? Right or left?
voidspace:
Right hand.
Tassos Stevens:
All right. So, playfully speaking, [REDACTED]
Then the right hand ends and we have the left hand. You want the left hand?
voidspace:
Yeah. Go on.
Tassos Stevens:
The left hand will say [REDACTED].
voidspace:
Oh, that’s beautiful. That’s very nice. I like that. Amazing.
Finally, what advice do you have for aspiring creators in interactive fields of all types?
Tassos Stevens:
Specifically for interactive theatre: I think you have to share it with an audience as soon as you possibly can, learn from that encounter, and then build it, develop it from there. As with any game design, there’s the process of play-testing. You need to test the material that you’re working with, in the sense of how people are going to play with it. It’s not so much the thing that you write, it’s how people will play with it. That’s what makes it interactive material.
voidspace:
You’re not making a flat artefact, you’re making a tool.
Tassos Stevens:
You’re making a tool or a toy.
I think it’s a matter of finding both what you enjoy, what you care about, but also what you enjoy in terms of the kind of work you might like to spend your time making.
Play stuff and read stuff, and always imagine that the makers know exactly what they’re doing, and think about the most striking parts of your experience, and try to figure out what the design thinking was that went into that.
It depends what you’re writing, but I think if you’re writing for people to play, there’s got to be space for them. There’s got to be kind of some scope for them to play their own way, and that can mean letting go of controlling it, and that’s okay, but you might need to make your own peace with that experience.
Remember that your work is never more important than the people playing it, and taking care of people I think, is critical. That has to be front and centre of what you do.
Finally, I’m actually wearing one of my favourite T shirts, which is a gift to me from my real life Jedi master, who was a teacher of games and play, called Bernie de Coney and wrote a book, The Well Played Game. Another bit of advice is to read The Well Played Game. It’s beautiful for life as much as for making, but I think it really gets to very tricky stuff.
I had a really important chapter of my life and in my work, where Coney made a shift towards sparking change through play, and focusing on the impact. I took some time out, six years ago, to think about that question. I wanted to go and speak to Bernie about it because I thought he’d have good things to say, which he did. But then the sad circumstance that he was then diagnosed with nasty late stage cancer. I went to see him in person in Indianapolis and spent a week with him, hanging out every afternoon and having really beautiful and important conversations about everything.
And we ended up making a game together, as a part of his legacy, because he was nervous about that, called a Game of Legacy. We were sitting in a park near his house underneath an oak tree, watching people playing on a set of swings, which were also a legacy bequest from him, special swings that were designed in a way that they had double seats. So, a big person could sit facing a small person, but they could both swing together, and then there’s two of these double seats next to each other. Bernie had suggested that they flip them so that big people could see each other. The small people see each other. And we saw the way that he’d always imagined people would play with them, with these two dads, I would guess, with their two daughters. Strangers to each other. It happened, and both the girls spontaneously burst into song. Let It Go, of course, just delightful.
But that was the 11th different way we’d seen people playing the swings before we saw that, which was the kind of the “ideal” way. There were all different ways, particularly kids with puppies, and that was kind of like the point in the end was that you can’t tell people how to play on swings. All you can do is give the swings. You can’t tell people what to do with the legacy. You’ve just got to give it and then they will find what they want to do with it.
Until you have the experience of watching people play on swings, you won’t be able to make a good swing. Take that as the metaphor, for any kind of interactive making. Nothing replaces that.
Find out more about Coney here.
A Magic Trick takes place online on 25 & 29 January 2024. Find out more here.